After hours of active use, your iPhone’s screen will become filled with more greasy fingerprints and smudges than the front doors of your local McDonalds. How can you see through all that film? Wipe if off? No, be creative. Express your inner artist. Let your fingers inspire you. Rub your iPhone’s slippery glass surface in delicate strokes, forming shapes and contours. Create images and silhouettes from the deposited facial oil. Where others see a smudgy screen, I see the face of a clown.
Now spray Windex onto a sheet of paper towel, lightly dampened. Then clean your filthy screen, and get back to work. Stop wasting time.
Nothing could be more relaxing than a luxurious home theater environment, complete with movie theater seating. Just lean back in your comfy reclining chair, and immerse yourself in a great flick brought to life by a huge projection screen. Pure ecstasy.
That is until you are ripped back into reality by the unmistakable sound of your iPhone being crushed by the very chair you are sitting in, like the jaws of a giant can crusher. Unlike the movie you were watching, this story doesn’t have a happy ending.
This is precisely what happened to one person, who posted his experience (complete with photos) on Flickr. Here’s the story…
My barely month-old iPhone met its end last night in the home theater.
Unbeknownst to me, the phone slipped out of my pocket and down between the cushion and side of the recliner. At the end of the movie, I had a little trouble pushing in the footrest. However, after a few increasingly enthusiastic shoves, I was able to snap the footrest back into place. After a few minutes, I noticed my iPhone was missing. Upon searching the chair, I discovered the phone underneath the recliner with part of the lower half shattered, but it still worked. I had repeatedly crunched my phone in the metal mechanism of the recliner.
Luckily, the folks at my local Apple store were kind enough to send me a new 8GB iPhone for free.
figure 1: the black featureless plane here is also an unfortunate metaphor
I don’t like to post iPhone wallpaper sites to the front page unless they’re really good; I usually put them in the rejected story links thread in the forum. And the one I’m about to link to is not good. The UI is designed for the iPhone, but you can’t actually download anything to the iPhone, so you have to download the wallpaper in a UI that’s incredibly constrained on your desktop web browser, leading me to believe that the site creator hasn’t actually used an iPhone. Supporting this theory is the fact that the site is hosted in Japan. And the name is a hilarious Engrish mangle: iPShake. Yes, I-P-Shake. But hey, it has horoscopes. You can get it all here.
A man recently attended a Weird Al Yankovic performance and managed to get an autograph. He asked the comic to sign the back of his iPhone, thereby reducing its resale value instantly. Tragic!
Justine Ezarik from Tasty Blog Snack got an unexpected surprise in the mail today – her first phone bill from AT&T, after purchasing an iPhone and switching carriers. Nothing unusual about that, except that it arrived in a box (that would be my first clue that something terribly wrong had occurred at AT&T’s billing department), not an envelope, and…oh yeah…it’s 300 freaking pages long!
AT&T apologized sincerely for this error, and promised that in future all iPhone bills will arrive in carefully packed boxes stacked on wooden palettes, delivered by forklift to your front door for your convenience.
28 year old Thomas Martel of Bonnie Brae, Colorado, found manipulating his iPhone to be difficult thanks to his big fat thumbs always getting in the way. His options were to upgrade to a device with larger buttons, or chop off his thumbs. The choice was obvious – chop off the thumbs, of course. Well not quite.
Martel underwent a relatively new procedure, called “Whittling”, that involves filing down bone and reconstructing muscles and fingertip, creating leaner thumbs that are less bulbous in form.
“From my old Treo, to my Blackberry, to this new iPhone, I had a hard time hitting the right buttons, and I always lost those little styluses. Sure, the procedure was expensive, but when I think of all the time I save by being able to use modern handhelds so much faster, I really think the surgery will pay for itself in ten to fifteen years. And what it’s saving me in frustration – that’s priceless.”
No, that’s crazy. My legs are too long for my car, bunching up under the steering wheel, but I don’t plan on having two inches of Femur removed to improve my driving.
Who says technology should adapt to us?
[UPDATE:]North Denver News has posted a clarification/retraction to this story, stating that it clearly was an innocent hoax. Here’s a tip…leave the art of parody to the pros, mkay? Thanks.
Flickr user waveman216 hurt himself, and he tacitly blames the iPhone. He dropped his iPhone, and didn’t follow proper safety protocol while using the treadmill. Seriously, the guy was using a treadmill with no helmet, no elbow pads, no knee pads, no shoulder pads, no chest armor, no body cast, no anything. So he drops his iPhone, like he hasn’t seen all of the video of iPhones being dropped and nothing happens to the iPhone, stops running, falls down, hurts himself, and can’t get up. It’s been posted all over, but originally showed up at Consumerist. I guess it’s a slow news day everywhere.
Remember all those horrific injury stories we heard when the Nintendo Wii first began arriving in homes, with flying Wii remotes carving a path of devastation and injury to humans and their canine friends? Apparently iPhone is next product in line to join the proud pantheon of killer consumer devices.
Travis Gohr learned a valuable lesson while excercising – treadmills and iPhones don’t mix. He chronicles the sad sequences of events that led to his folly.
Or, how to kill yourself with an iPhone.
Step 1. Purchase an iPhone. I’d recommend the more valuable one as that will make you more willing to risk life for it.
Step 2. Gain access to a treadmill.
Step 3. Use said iPhone while using treadmill.
Step 4. When your iPhone magically slides off the stand, hits the treadmill and rockets off behind you, make SURE to follow it’s trajectory with your head, not just your eyes.
Step 5. If you’ve completed step 4 correctly you should now be facing sideways on the treadmill instead of forward. Your head should also be cranked completely around behind you. The position of your body will lead to you being completely off balance. Let the treadmill do the rest.
Step 6. Your feet should fly out from under you and if your head is still facing backwards you should land flat on your back on the treadmill. It will then proceed to rocket you backwards.
Step 7. This is of UTMOST importance. You will only stay airborne for a quick second and when you come down, the back of the treadmill will strike somewhere on your body. Make SURE it hits you DIRECTLY in the spine.
Step 8. You should now have a broken spine. If not, repeat. Or, you might just end up blogging about how you ended up with a wicked pressure burst on your back.
You know the old saying “When one door closes, another one opens”? Well in Apple’s case the reverse sometimes proves to be true. Take for example the recently release iPhone update which, among other things, supposedly includes several bug fixes. Unfortunately it also introduces a few bugs as well, or at least that is the case with Mail.
Since installing the update Mail performs with all the vigor and reliability of a US Postal carrier, which is to say not much. I can’t go one hour without Mail locking up on me or crapping out in some fashion. In a typical scenario, I tap on the Mail icon > go to one of my IMAP accounts > navigate to the inbox > wait for it to check for new mail > while it’s doing that I often go on to another application as I wait (what can I say, EDGE is slow). When I go back into Mail I am greeted with a completely black screen, save for the toolbar at the top which displays the AT&T logo, time, battery meter, etc.
That’s it! Nothing.
If I stay at that screen long enough I am eventually deposited back to the home screen as Mail finally takes its death dive. Often I cannot even get back to the home screen because Mail is apparently hogging all available process resources as it chugs and gurgles its last breath. In cases where Mail doesn’t succumb to fatal injury, I experience complete idle behavior.
If I tap on the account sync icon, asking Mail to check for and retrieve new email…nothing happens. No attempt is even made to connect with the mail server – even when a strong EDGE or WiFi connection is available. It just stays there displaying my old read email, while new (unread) email is in fact sitting on the server ready for retrieval.
At first this issue was simply annoying. Now it’s becoming a hindrance. I use my iPhone to conduct business. Email is mission critical for me.
So Apple, if you could offer a fix for these issues, now would be a good time to resolve them.
